where does anything go, really?

as i pondered the fate of couches the other day, i stirred up in myself something that now refuses to rest. it suddenly feels like a great injustice to me that all of the items and belongings i have had throughout my lifetime are still in existence somewhere but i don't have them. randomly i find myself remembering a jewelry box or a toy that i loved as a child and i wonder where does stuff go? i have no recollection of throwing it away, but someone must have and now i can't have it anymore. but i want it. and it doesn't seem fair that i can't have it since no one else is using it either and the only thing keeping me from my small treasures is the fact that i don't know where they are. i want my stuff back! and it kind of messes with my head to think about the fact that it all still exists, somewhere. it feels as though my previous belongings live only in the past in a small bedroom in a medium-size town in a tiny state in my minuscule childhood. i can picture my earring trees, but they are on a dresser that has moved on from the room that is no longer bright green in a house that a stranger now lives in. if i were to stumble upon an item that i know beyond a shadow of a doubt was mine and that i didn't sell it or officially give it away, would it still be mine? even if the last time i saw it was 19 years ago?

this reminds me of a time that i nearly had a mental break as a child because my dad threw away the legs to the orange dining room table that i had gotten for my barbie mansion. the orange table had matching orange chairs and they were built to be a set and they were exactly the right size, to scale, for each other. i loved shit like this when i was little. the chairs were the right height for a barbie to sit on (if barbie had been given knee joints by the good people at Mattel) and the table height was right at her (non-existent) rib cage. the world absolutely had to be "to-scale" in my small life, and i was absolutely delighted when it was. much like the episode of FRIENDS when monica inherits the dollhouse and phoebe wants to play but monica won't let her because all of the toys she brings are either the wrong size or they don't match the house. i understood that scene so well it made me a little sad. i think that i would like to imagine myself to be more of a phoebe than a monica, but who am i kidding? if one of my friends had suggested that a brontosaurus start nibbling from the plant growth in the imaginary window sills in my barbie mansion i would have sent her home. or if the homemade barbie sleeping bag that i got for christmas had not been exactly the same size as the pink barbie bed that i already had, i would not have been able to allow it into the barbie mansion.

so one day, i went to my barbie mansion to serve dinner and the top of my orange barbie table was just sitting on the barbie floor. no legs, just table top. as hard as this is to admit, i honestly started to cry (uncontrollably) when my father identified the four orange sticks that he threw away the day before as my one-time barbie table legs. at that time i remember actually believing that my parents would drive me to the local "dump" and i would crawl around in piles of trash searching desperately for my orange sticks. i had never been so angry at my dad! i yelled at him over and over again. "WHY would you throw away something that obviously had a purpose!?!? did they LOOK like garbage?" they were right there by the barbie mansion. right there with the table made of a matching orange hue. to this day, i am so curious about this. why would a person pick up something that he had never seen before and just throw it away? so i begged my parents to allow me to trudge through the dump to find my barbie table legs. they didn't.
those orange sticks are still out there somewhere. but of course, the table top is long since gone. as are the barbies. and the mansion's elevator and the barbie bubble bathtub and the purple corvette. all out there somewhere amid the muck and filth of life's waste. i can accept that i will never see any of the props that adorn my childhood memories again, but i can't help but hope that at least a few of them still have each other.